This is the README for InfoWow.bs.NIHS.tgz [Download] [Browse] [Up]
October 11, 1997 InfoWow is a demonstration app; think of it as a mini-example. It shows how you can make animated Info Panels. I've included a quad-fat binary, as well, so you can see what it does right away. When you launch the app, you will note that it does nothing. But it does have two Info... panels. Bring them up and play with them... The first panel is an animated panel that is kind of nifty. By changing the images it uses, you could even re-use it lock, stock, and barrel in your own application. There are three images and they sequence as follows: (1) image #1 fades in. (2) Image #2 scrolls upward, wiping out image #1. (3) image #3 fades in, obscuring Image #2, pauses, and then fades out. Repeat ad infinitum, or until the Info... panel is dismissed. The animation is restarted whenever the panel is brough up. Clicking the Info... menu item when the panel is up restarts the animation from the beginning. The code for this is very similar to the code in my Columns game's Info... panel which has constantly falling columns of colored blocks in the background. The second panel is from an app I wrote for Whitelight that was never released publically. The app did for email what a mail merge does for a word processor document. (And it predated email spam.) I'm considering rewriting the app and selling it for Rhapsody, but I wouldn't want it used as a spammer's tool. Since I'm strongly anti-spam, this is a huge internal struggle for me. :-) Actually, there are plenty of legitimate non-spam uses for it, so you never know...one cool thing was that it could even custom generate NeXTMail messages, with attachments and all! At any rate, this is the Info... panel I wrote for it. Bring it up and it is just a normal, pedestrian, boring Info... panel. But click on the app's icon, and well, it just starts spewing little envelopes all over your screen. (They're actually, each and every envelope, a little bitty window whose position on the screen keeps getting updated to create an animation effect.) The only way to turn it off is to dismiss the panel. If the panel is moved, the source of the spewing envelopes moves with the panel, of course. I've provided the source code so you can see how all this is accomplished. It is actually rather trivial...but there's no point in having everyone roll their own. One of these days, I'll try to refine these classes (ie generalize them a little bit) and include them in the MiscKit. Until then, re-use them how you will. I'm still retaining the copyrights on my code, but you are welcome to use and modify the code for free in any application you write, commercial or not. Just please don't claim that you wrote it, because you didn't. :-) Enjoy! Don Yacktman don@misckit.com http://www.misckit.com/don/index.html P.S. This is NEXTSTEP code. I'll be making an OPENSTEP version and using it as demo code in an upcoming tutorial article for Stepwise (http://www.stepwise.com). Keep on the lookout for it!
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Netfuture.ch.